The Best Robot Vacuums

Updated November 19, 2018

We’ve made the new Roomba i7+ a super-upgrade pick, and we added notes on a handful of other new models that have come out this fall.

Your guide

Liam McCabe

Robot vacuums don’t procrastinate or get bored, and most people who own one are happy that it keeps their floors tidy all the time with barely any effort. We’ve tested a few dozen since 2012, and think that the Eufy RoboVac 11S is the one to check out first. It cleans well and rarely gets stuck, and is particularly great because it’s much quieter and fits under more furniture than other affordable bots.

Buying Options

The Eufy RoboVac 11S will clean almost every nook of your house, yet you’ll barely notice it. Plenty of robots are good and affordable now, but none of them blend into the background like the 11S does. I’m usually at home while I run my robot vacuums, and trust me, the noise matters. The 11S sounds more like a fan than a vacuum, and it shouldn’t suck your attention or get on your nerves even if you’re in the same room while it’s running. It’s one of the bots that’s least likely to get stuck and quit cleaning mid-session, and it is strong and persistent enough to actually pick up more debris in some situations than bots that cost two or three times as much.

Buying Options

The Eufy RoboVac 30 is a premium version of the 11S, and if you see it for the same price (or less) than the 11S, definitely buy the 30. It has a different paint job and a little extra suction, but more important, it comes with 20 feet of magnetic strips that let you create “do not cross” lines to, for example, block off a particular room with a carpet that will choke the bot. The 11S does not work with the strips at all, so you won’t be able to buy them later.

The RoboVac 11S and RoboVac 30 have a few downsides. They also don’t have Wi-Fi, so unlike most of today’s robot vacuums, you can’t control them through an app or with a voice assistant. (You could upgrade to the RoboVac 30C if you want those features, but it’s usually pretty expensive.) The RoboVac models don’t seem to be as sturdy as other bots, particularly iRobot Roomba models, and currently Eufy doesn’t make it easy to find replacements for wheels or other major moving parts.

Buying Options

If you’re bothered by the Eufy models’ missing Wi-Fi and short lifespans, check out the iRobot Roomba 690 instead. It’s another semi-random, bump-and-run model. But it’s meant to be repaired over time, at home—and iRobot has an excellent track record for keeping spare parts available for ages. So if you do the upkeep, the Roomba 690 should last long enough that you’ll save money compared with the Eufy robots. And the Roomba 690 can also connect to Wi-Fi, which allows you to control it with an easy-to-use app or Alexa voice commands. It also comes with a “lighthouse” that creates an invisible barrier, which is much more elegant than the Eufy 30 model’s bot-blocking magnetic strips. On the downside, the Roomba 690 is louder, bigger, more expensive, and not obviously better at cleaning.

Buying Options

If you have to clean a large space, or just prefer a robot that looks like it knows where it’s going, you might want to upgrade to a robot that can map your house while it works. And if you go that route, we’d recommend one of the higher-end Roomba models. These bots use a camera to keep track of their location in your home, drive in a predictable, grid-like pattern, and reliably return to their docks—where, in case they didn’t finish cleaning, they can recharge their batteries and then pick up where they left off. They’re also much stronger cleaners than our cheaper picks, especially for getting pet hair out of thicker rugs.

So which one should you get? The Roomba 960 has the best balance of price, pleasantness, and performance of any mapping-capable robot vacuum we’ve tested. We’ve had one for a couple of years, and it’s been consistently excellent. But if you can afford it, the flagship Roomba i7+ is the very best robot vacuum that money can buy, able to empty its own dustbin (the dock is a vacuum that sucks the debris out of the bot through a trap door) and clean specific rooms on command. Both of those marquee features actually work, and legitimately make it even more convenient than other great robots. (You can read our full review of the Roomba i7+ here.)

To be clear: Just because we haven’t talked about a particular robot so far doesn’t mean we think it’s bad or that you’re making a mistake if you buy it. Later in this guide, we’ll cover a handful of other bots that we like but that don’t have as much broad appeal as the ones we’ve already talked about.

Why you should trust us

I’ve written about robot vacuums for Wirecutter since 2013, logging hundreds of hours of research and testing in that time. (I’m also the co-author and editor for Wirecutter’s other vacuum guides, including those about cordless, handheld, and traditional plug-in styles.) Altogether I’ve looked into about 150 different robots and tested about 30 models from 10 brands over hundreds of cleaning cycles at my home (I’m on my third apartment since I started) and in some of my friends’ houses, too. Most of my guests ask me what the hell I’m doing with so many robots.

In addition to my own testing, I’ve gotten many other perspectives:

I’ve spoken directly with dozens of robot-vacuum owners with all kinds of living situations. They live in apartments and single-family homes of old and new construction with lots of small rooms and big open-concept spaces. Some of them live alone; others have a few kids and hairy dogs. One guy even lives in a mansion near a volcano.

I’ve paid attention to all of the comments, tweets, and emails from our readers about our picks and other models you’d like to see us test, and their general questions about how robot vacuums work and what people expect from them.

I’ve lurked on the Robot Reviews forum for robot-vacuum enthusiasts and messaged with a few of its moderators and active posters over the years.

I’ve read hundreds of reviews posted on big retailers’ websites, including Amazon and Best Buy. We’ve learned about quality-control problems or design flaws in a few models this way.

I’ve talked to representatives from just about all of the major robot vacuum brands, including iRobot (Roomba), EcoVacs, Neato, iLife, Electrolux, Roborock, Samsung, LG, and Dyson.

I’ve tracked down a few engineers who used to work on robot vacuums, including Bruno Hexsel, a former software engineer for Neato, and Duane Gilbert, a former hardware engineer for iRobot. (Gilbert is also a patent-holder for the AeroForce cleaning system, which is still used in the Roomba 800 and 900 Series, and he is also working on a brand-new robot vacuum of his own.)

I’ve looked at reviews from other publications to see if I missed anything in my own testing and reporting. Shout out to TechGearLab, who has a great roundup, with carefully controlled testing and very different priorities for how it picks its favorites. We don’t agree with most of the site’s conclusions, but if you want another perspective on robot vacuums, TechGearLab’s is very thorough and well-presented.

This guide accounts for all of the robot vacuums available in the US as of July 2018. We try to update this guide every few months, whenever promising new models come out. But if it seems like we’re behind the curve on our recommendations, leave a comment or hit us up on Twitter—we may already be testing whichever new model you’re curious about.

Do robot vacuums really work?

Yes, bots actually work. They’re not just some toy or novelty item. And some good ones cost less than lots of popular “traditional” vacuums that you have to push around yourself.

If you’re short on time or just hate vacuuming, a robot vacuum will probably make your life easier. All you need to do is press start, and the bot figures out the rest. You don’t need to set anything up. Over many years of research and testing, we’ve found that the best robots run well on most kinds of flooring in any floor plan, and can pick up pretty much any type of obvious debris.

New owners are usually surprised by how much junk these things grab off their floors. “My Roomba fills itself completely in my tiny apartment everyday,” said Wirecutter staff member Alex Arpaia. “I don’t know how it’s possible.” Wirecutter founder Brian Lam vacuums his house with a traditional plug-in vacuum once a week, but his bots still find tons of dust in between those big cleanings.

Pet owners usually gain the most from a robot vacuum.

The secret is that they don’t procrastinate or get bored: A bot that runs for an hour or two, a few times per week, will keep your home much cleaner than 10 minutes of half-hearted human-driven vacuuming a few times per month. They’re also great at getting into spots that people tend to skip, like underneath the bed or couch. Most people still bust out a “manual” vacuum from time to time, but some rely entirely on their robots.

You don’t even have to remember to turn on your bot every time you want to use it: All of them can be set to run on a schedule, and you can turn many of them on from your phone via Wi-Fi. One former Wirecutter staff member even used her robot as an alarm clock in the morning.

Pet owners usually gain the most from a robot vacuum because they can automatically clean stray hair, kibble, or litter every day, so that the debris never gets a chance to build up to nuisance levels.

The only type of flooring that’s off-limits is high-pile carpet (fibers that are about ¾ inch or longer) because the wheels can’t get enough traction and the spinning brushes can jam. But bots also can’t climb stairs, and they don’t work on couches, curtains, cars—anything that isn’t a relatively flat floor.

Every robot can get stuck on stray charging cables, and pretty much all of them will tangle on light fabrics (like laundry) and smear dog turds (this is a real hazard). Beyond these universal bot-traps, every model has specific weaknesses, so you should make sure whatever you choose will be a good fit for your floor plan.

Most robot vacuums will get snagged on charging cables, which jam the brush roll or sometimes pull the bots off course. Video: Michael Hession

Bots also tend to struggle with thresholds, certain types of furniture supports, and sometimes even floor-to-rug transitions. Video: Michael Hession

And if a robot runs across anything that can be smeared, get ready to do some nasty cleanup. Video: Michael Hession

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If you have a multistory home, you can carry your bot between floors as needed (they weigh less than 10 pounds). Bots forget your floor plan and start fresh before every cleaning (with a couple of exceptions), so they won’t be confused by the change of scenery.

Try not to watch your robot work. It will look stupid at least some of the time and that may shatter the illusion that you have an artificially intelligent magic machine.

Ideally, you’ll want to run your robot vacuum while you’re out of the house, because most of them are loud enough that they’ll get on your nerves after about 20 minutes. But plenty of people run them while they’re at home, and that’s fine too—you can get a quiet bot, or find other ways to deal with the noise.

Either way, we’d suggest that you try not to watch your robot work. The happiest bot owners tend to be the ones that don’t pay attention. Our theory is that it’s because robots look stupid at least some of the time—making weird turns, missing spots, struggling to escape from a trap—and it can shatter the illusion that you have an artificially intelligent magic machine. That’s especially true for the cheaper robots that navigate semi-randomly, but even the expensive models that move in a predictable pattern will goof up sometimes. Better to let the robot do its job in peace so that all you have to do is empty the bin and appreciate your tidy floors.

Even if you can accept (or ignore) the navigational quirks, bots still won’t work perfectly all of the time. Every model we’ve tested has gotten trapped or tangled at least occasionally. In some homes, even the best bots may get stuck fairly often. You can make adjustments to your space (like picking up cords and lightweight mats) so the bots run more smoothly, or just deal with the occasional failed cleaning session. But some people, in the end, can’t get comfortable with the limitations. Try to buy from a retailer with a return policy of at least a few weeks in case using a bot is just not working out for you.

How we picked

Photo: Liam McCabe

Navigation is the hardest and most important thing

It’s tricky to make a robot vacuum navigate through your home without getting stuck or lost. Bruno Hexsel, a former software engineer for Neato, told us that he spent a huge chunk of his time at the company working on algorithms to help robots get unstuck from common hazards.

It’s not so different from a self-driving car. Yeah, the stakes are much lower for a 9-pound robot blooping around your living room than they are for a 3,500-pound car hurtling down a public highway. But they both need to navigate their environments on the fly, with an unpredictable set of obstacles and hazards, in unique combinations, that can change constantly.

The most important challenge for any bot is to avoid getting stuck or otherwise quitting mid-cycle.

The challenges are similar enough that several former robot-vacuum engineers now work on building autonomous-vehicle nav systems—including Hexsel, whose current employer is in stealth mode. Duane Gilbert, formerly of iRobot, works at Nio (as of June 2018), a startup working on self-driving electric cars.

Gilbert told us that it’s arguably harder to get a robot vacuum to navigate reliably, because your home actually has more variables than a road. Floors don’t have traffic lines or mile markers or light poles to orient the bot, and the traction on different types of rugs is much trickier than on just asphalt. And you can put more sensors—and of a higher quality—in a $40,000 car than you can in a $700 robot.

So what does a robot vacuum need to do in order to navigate a real home?

Don’t get stuck

Over many years of using robot vacuums, we’ve found that the robots that keep moving are the ones that keep your floors the tidiest. So the most important challenge for any bot is to avoid getting stuck or otherwise quitting mid-cycle. Sophisticated mapping and powerful suction don’t mean anything if the bot stops running 10 minutes after you leave for work.

The most common bot-trapping hazards include power cords, charging cables, stray laundry (especially socks), dangling curtains or bed sheets, rug edges, floor registers, tall thresholds (some bots can’t get over them), and furniture with tube-shaped or extra-wide supports that lie across the floor. Higher-end models can have trouble with dim lighting (if they have a camera) and chromed furniture (if they use lidar). Black rugs (or other dark, nonreflective flooring) look like a bottomless pit to the anti-drop sensors, so many bots won’t clean them. Some homes have more of these traps than others; most homes have at least a few.

Great bots can deal with almost all of those hazards, while others are helpless around most of them. So many factors affect their performance around obstacles: The number and placement of bump sensors, the tuning of the drop sensors, the way the brushes spin, how the robot senses tangles or jams, the size of the wheels, the spring tension and pivot placement in the suspension—not to mention the algorithms that turn the input from the sensors into robot movements. Spending more doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get a nimble, trap-escaping robot. Some of the most expensive models are also the most likely to get stuck, and vice versa.

Don’t get lost

The second-biggest challenge is to clean as much of the house as possible without missing many patches. There are a couple ways to accomplish this.

The simpler, cheaper way is a semi-random, bump-and-run navigation style, where the robot essentially bumbles around the house until its battery runs out, not following any particular path, making semi-random turns whenever it comes across an obstacle and can’t keep driving in a straight line.

Most lower-cost robots navigate semi-randomly, scooting around until the battery dies. It doesn’t look too smart, but it’s a perfectly effective system in many homes. Video: Liam McCabe

As dumb as they can look, we’ve found that bump-and-run models often pick up more total debris than “smarter” robots because they are so persistent, making two or three passes in a single session (as long as the area isn’t too big). Sure, the bump-and-run bots might miss a patch or even an entire room one day, but if you run it at least a few days per week, it should end up getting around to everything often enough that your floors always feel totally tidy. “I once watched [my bot] vacuum the same 5-by-8 area for a solid 30 minutes,” said Wirecutter staff member Gustave Gerhardt, “but mostly its randomness is effective.”

Bump-and-run bots aren’t the best fit for everyone. Some people feel stressed out from watching its random nav system miss a big tuft of cat hair over and over. Larger homes increase the chances that these bots will miss patches (1,200 square feet per level is a practical limit). And a choppy floor plan with narrow doorways increases the chance that the bot will spend too much time cleaning one particular section while it fumbles for an exit.

If you’re willing to pay more, higher-end mapping bots figure out the layout of your home, and follow a more orderly, grid-like cleaning path so that they don’t miss anything or overclean any room. They can also reliably return to their docks, recharge their batteries, then pick up cleaning where they left off if they hadn’t finished. Essentially, they should clean an entire level of your house, every single session, no matter what your floor plan looks like. That’s useful for bigger homes, where bump-and-run bots might get lost. Plus, life is chaotic enough, so if you’ll get some peace of mind from a robot that drives in a predictable pattern and consistently returns to its dock, treat yourself.

Mapping systems come in a few varieties:

Some mapping bots feel their way around your house sort of like a bump-and-run robot, except they follow a grid-like pattern and typically use a ceiling-facing camera (among other tricks) to track their position. You could call them bump-and-track bots. Essentially, they draw a map based on what they’ve already encountered.

Other mapping bots use a rangefinder to pre-map each section of your house. That is, they scan for obstacles and draw most of their map before they start cleaning any particular area. Most of these models rely on lasers (lidar), though we’ve seen some that rely on a camera or laser-and-camera combo.

Our take: Mapping bots are not strictly better than bump-and-run bots, even though they can cost two, three, even four times as much. They aren’t necessarily better at avoiding or escaping traps. The extra complexity in their nav systems leads many of them to get confused more easily, so that they’re more likely to quit cleaning in the middle of a session. Plus, mapping bots with weak suction pick up less debris than bump-and-run bots, because they make only a single pass in any cleaning session. Just because a mapping bot looks smarter doesn’t mean it’ll be better at cleaning your house. So before you pay extra, consider a bump-and-run bot first.

Suck up the obvious junk

Cleaning performance obviously matters, though it’s not as important as most people think. As long as your floors look tidy from eye level, and you don’t feel like any crumbs or hair are sticking to your feet when you walk around, the bot is doing its job. If a bot sucks some extra-fine dust out of your rugs, that’s a nice bonus, but it’s not the purpose of the product. Even the strongest, most expensive robot has a fraction of the cleaning power of an $80 upright vacuum. You can’t rely on a robot to deep-clean your carpets, so we don’t think it’s worth fretting over which bots have the absolute-strongest cleaning power.

At a minimum, robot vacuums need a brush roll and preferably at least one side brush to clean effectively.

As with any kind of vacuum cleaner, suction and brush-roll action both affect cleaning performance. For bump-and-run robots, battery life is also a factor—more time on the floor means more opportunities for cleaning (though it’s not very important for mapping robots, because they can recharge themselves mid-session and pick up where they left off).

If you have more of one key specification, you can get away with less of the others. Some bots have strong suction but less brush action; for others, the opposite. Many have fairly weak cleaning power, but enough battery life to make multiple passes. (Some models have adjustable suction settings so you can choose the balance of battery life and suction that suits your layout best, though they don’t always make a noticeable difference.) In our experience, several of these approaches are valid, able to pick up a lot of debris.

That said, if you have thicker rugs (fibers ½ inch to ¾ inch) and long-haired pets, you should pay extra for a robot with a little extra cleaning power than the cheaper bots. No matter how many passes the low-powered ones make, they just won’t pick up enough fuzz to make most people happy in these situations.

What else matters

In descending order of importance, roughly:

Quieter robots are easier to tolerate if you have to be at home while they’re running. We measured the Eufy 11S at 54 dBC (measured from 10 feet away), which is really quiet. 60 dBC was more typical in our tests. Several models run near 65 dBC when they’re on bare floors, which is loud enough to be annoying.

Robots that are relatively short and lightweight have an advantage over taller, heavier bots, because they can get under more furniture and tend to be better at driving over thresholds and bare-floor-to-carpet transitions. Anything under 3 inches is very short. Apart from height, we’ve found that the shape of the bot isn’t super important: Yeah, D-shaped bots fit into corners better than round bots do, but round bots have side brushes that mostly accomplish the same thing, as long as you’re not purposely sprinkling powder up against your baseboards to test their abilities.

Good bots should have replacement parts that are easy to find—at least filters, but preferably brushes, batteries, wheels, and even the transmission. Knockoff filters are okay, but moving parts or electronics should be bought from the manufacturer, so that you don’t risk damaging the robot. It’s also helpful when the bots are easy to take apart for cleanings or repairs.

Boundary markers can be useful if you don’t want your bot crossing into a certain room, plowing into your pet’s water bowl, or hurtling into an area where it always gets stuck. We like the Roomba virtual walls the best because they’re reliable and unobtrusive. Several bots now let you draw boundaries using the smartphone app—a great idea with room for improvement. Other bots rely on ugly magnetic strips, laid across your floor, to turn the bot away. Many cheap bots have no boundary markers at all.

Wi-Fi connectivity can be useful when it works correctly. It lets you add your bot to your home wireless network so that you can control it from a smartphone app, or sometimes through a voice assistant (like Alexa or Google Home). The obvious use is that you can start or stop the bot while you’re away from home. Apps also make it easy to set a cleaning schedule, keep track of when you need to replace parts, or adjust certain cleaning settings. (Bots without Wi-Fi usually come with a physical remote control instead, which is still handy.)

Like anything involving wireless networks, nobody can guarantee that your robot’s Wi-Fi will work smoothly. And this type of troubleshooting can make you shake with rage. Plus, all robots have the ability to collect at least some data about your floor plan (the mapping bots can collect quite a bit), and if they connect to Wi-Fi, there’s always some chance that the data falls into unwanted hands. For example, a security firm figured out how to look directly through the camera on certain LG robot vacuums. And a minor panic broke out after a Reuters article misreported that iRobot had plans to sell owner data to third parties. We haven’t looked closely enough at any brand’s terms of service to know what they are doing (or could do) with your data. But if you’re annoyed or creeped out by the whole thing, you can either buy a non-connected bot or just never set up the Wi-Fi—these bots all still clean your house automatically even if you don’t connect them to the Internet.

Most bots have a few different cleaning modes beyond the main automatic whole-house setting. In our experience, most people never use any of them, but you might find a spot-cleaning mode (very common) or the manual steering option (less common) convenient for taking care of small, contained messes.

The size of the dustbin is mostly inconsequential. If you have pets, yes, the bin might fill up quickly the first few times you run a good robot, as it works through the backlog of hair that you didn’t know had built up around your house. But after a week of regular cleanings, give or take, it should start to come back with less and less hair. The differences in bin size from model to model aren’t that substantial, anyway. So if your pack of shaggy dogs stuffs up one robot, it’ll probably stuff up every robot (unless it can empty itself mid-session, like the Roomba i7+).

We do read lots of owner reviews for any robot that we consider recommending, though we don’t pay much attention to the average scores anymore. Reviews are absolutely useful for learning about poor reliability or customer service (most bots have a one-year warranty, for what it’s worth), or navigational problems that we didn’t find on our own. It also helps us understand what our readers might want to know and what’s actually important to them. But review manipulation has become common, so we don’t trust average owner ratings as much as we used to.

How we tested

We torture-tested each robot in an area cluttered with several chairs, stray USB cables, a sock, a flat-weave area rug with uneven edges and tassels, and a tall threshold—all of the most common bot-trapping obstacles. Video: Liam McCabe

I’ve tested 27 of the robot vacuums that are currently available as of November 2018. With each model, I run at least two regular cleaning cycles around my apartment. It’s a challenging environment for robots: About 1,000 square feet chopped into nine rooms, with lots of tall thresholds. I don’t have any permanent carpet, but I do have 10 different area rugs, ranging from lightweight doormats to rubber-backed, medium-pile rugs that take up half a room. I have a long-haired cat, a long-haired wife, and an infant daughter, who all leave plenty for the robot to pick up (for my part, I spill a lot of coffee grounds). It’s really effective for finding a bot’s weaknesses.

If the bots do a good job cleaning my whole apartment, I’ll put them through some stress tests.

In one test, I run the bot in a room with two chairs, some stray USB cables, a sock, a flat-weave area rug with uneven edges and tassels, and a tall threshold—most of the common bot-trapping obstacles in one place.

In another test, I pour out about ⅛ cup of all-purpose flour across an area rug and bare floor (including some against a baseboard) and let the bot try to suck it up for a couple of minutes. This gives me a visual gauge for each bot’s raw cleaning power.

I have a long-haired cat, a long-haired wife, and an infant daughter, who all leave plenty for the robot to pick up (for my part, I spill a lot of coffee grounds).

And then I sprinkle a 2-ounce mixture of cat litter and coffee grounds around my dining room, which has a mix of bare wood and low-pile rug as well as a big table with four chairs and a bench underneath it. I run each bot for 25 minutes or until it stops on its own, whichever comes first. When it’s done, I weigh how much debris each bot managed to pick up.

The dust- and crumb-pickup stress tests are only meant to give us an idea of each bot’s cleaning power—they don’t tell the whole story, and we don’t weigh them too heavily when we’re deciding what to recommend.

I make sure to try out anything related to the interface or user experience: companion smartphone apps (and all the features within, like no-go lines or suction adjustments), compatibility with voice assistants like Alexa, the physical remote, scheduling system, boundary markers, and anything else like that.

Using a noise-meter app, I measure the volume and frequency of each bot from about 10 feet away as they work.

Then I check how easy it is to take each bot apart and find replacement parts online.

When I find robots that do well on all of those tests, I try to run them as much as possible for a few weeks to see if they perform consistently. Some bots struggle more with navigation than the first rounds of testing revealed, in ways that I wouldn’t have thought of. For example, through this kind of testing I found that Roomba 900-series bots struggled around sunset, and that software updates to the Electrolux Pure i9 sometimes screwed up the navigation.

Buying Options

Plenty of affordable robot vacuums clean and navigate effectively, including the Eufy RoboVac 11S. But we like this one the most because it’s so much quieter, and it can fit underneath more furniture than anything else we tested.

The 11S is quiet enough that you could easily forget that it’s running if you have to be home while it runs. We measured it at 54 dBC (from 10 feet away), a full 5 dBC quieter than the EcoVacs Deebot N79 and Roomba 690—that’s a major difference. It sounds more like a fan than a vacuum cleaner. Plenty of other bots are tolerably loud, but the 11S is especially hushed.

Another surprisingly useful upside to the 11S is its short body. It may end up cleaning more of your home than other bots just because it fits beneath more stuff. At 2.85 inches, it’s about three-tenths of an inch shorter than the EcoVacs Deebot N79 (another good, cheap, short robot). That may not seem like much, but it’s enough for the 11S to slide under even more low-clearance furniture where dust and hair build up but never see the light of day. The 11S surprised me first when it disappeared under my bed and then again when it reemerged with an unholy amount of cat hair stuffed into its bin and wrapped on the brush roll.

Like a bunch of other good robots, the Eufy 11S is a nimble navigator and rarely gets stuck. In our testing, this bump-and-run bot only stopped running when it got tangled on a cord or wedged itself underneath something (both of which can stop any robot), and when it beached itself on a tall threshold once. The 11S seems to recognize when it runs into a trap, then runs a particular routine for escaping. For instance, if it’s stuck on a threshold, it rocks itself back and forth until it gets itself unstuck. Or if something starts jamming the brush roll, it’ll usually back away from the jam.

The 11S has a relatively small brush compared with other robot vacuums, but the dual side brushes help sweep debris toward the intake. Photo: Liam McCabe

The clamshell-style dustbin is easy to empty. Photo: Liam McCabe

The 11S is a very solid cleaner for the price. As we laid out earlier in this guide, you don’t have to worry too much about a bot’s cleaning performance—most of them can suck up obvious debris, as long as the navigation system is nimble enough to keep them moving. And although we do run a couple of controlled cleaning tests, we don’t weigh the results too heavily when we decide to make recommendations.

It may end up cleaning more of your home than other bots just because it fits beneath more stuff.

But to prove our point that affordable bump-and-run bots like the 11S can pick up just as much obvious debris as the priciest bots (at least in some situations), take the results of our crumb-pickup test: The 11S actually collected a little bit more debris than anything else we tested: 1.8 ounces out of a 2-ounce mixture of coffee grounds and cat litter. One of our upgrade picks, the Roomba 960, sucked up a similar 1.75 ounces—probably within the test’s margin for error. But a couple of the worst performers captured just 1.4 ounces. We think the results show that the 11S can be very effective at keeping your home tidy as long as it’s able to consistently navigate your space.

Here’s why we think the 11S is so effective in the real world:

The battery life is as long as you’ll find in a bot at this price. Because it’s a bump-and-run robot, that allows it to make more passes around your home, which in turn gives it more opportunities to suck up debris and to cover every patch of ground. We measured its life to be 100 minutes at full power and up to another 50 minutes at reduced power while it looks for its charging dock.

The brush roll is a simple but proven design: A single bristle/blade combo brush, effective enough for loosening obvious debris from short rugs and scooching it toward the intake.

And the suction is strong enough to get most types of visible debris, and is slightly better than some competing models. Eufy says this model has 1,300 pascals of suction, which is definitely more than the EcoVacs N79 (at 1,000 Pa). Most other robot makers don’t publish any suction specs, so we’re not actually sure how it compares with the Roomba 690, for instance. We’re also not sure that the modestly stronger suction matters much: We didn’t notice a big difference compared with the N79 and Roomba 690 in our dust-pickup test. But maybe there are some cases we’re not thinking of where it could help. And to be clear, some higher-end robots have noticeably more cleaning power than the 11S. The Roomba 960 and Electrolux Pure i9, for example, can clean as much debris in a single pass as the 11S manages after two or more passes, and pick up much more small, dusty debris period, particularly out of carpets.

Other noteworthy points:

The 11S itself has a single button on the top of its body that starts or stops the cleaning. It also comes with a remote control (2 AAA batteries are included) that can do the same, but also lets you set a daily cleaning time, adjust the suction (we recommend the BoostIQ setting, which ramps up the power slightly when it senses it’s cleaning a rug), steer it manually using a directional pad, or run a few different routines like spot clean (useful), edge clean (meh), and room cleaning (don’t bother).

And for those of you keeping track, the Eufy RoboVac 11S is actually built by Eufy in its own factory, according to company representatives. In the past, Eufy robots were just relabeled versions of other manufacturers’ machines (the Eufy 11 was the same bot as the EcoVacs Deebot N79, for example—a fact we’ve confirmed with EcoVacs). But now the company makes its own gear.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The Eufy 11S doesn’t have Wi-Fi or any smart-home connectivity, but you can still set a daily cleaning schedule with the remote control. Photo: Liam McCabe

The most obvious downside is that the 11S doesn’t have Wi-Fi, so you can’t control it from your phone or with voice commands. We’ve asked around and were surprised to find that actually, most people are pretty lukewarm on Wi-Fi control anyway. But if that’s a dealbreaker for you, check out the Roomba 690.

As a relatively low-cost robot vacuum, the 11S has some limitations in common with others at its price. For instance: The semi-random, bump-and-run navigation irks some people, and isn’t the most efficient method for cleaning larger homes. It doesn’t work with boundary markers, so you won’t be able to block it from going into certain areas unless you set up another physical boundary. At least some of the time (possibly much of the time, depending on the layout of your house), it won’t make it back to its dock. And though it’s a persistent and basically effective cleaner, it’s not the best tool for cleaning longer rugs with lots of ground-in pet hair. You can buy your way out of these problems with a pricier robot, like the Roomba 960 or plenty of others that we cover later in the guide.

We’re not sure that Eufy robots are built to last. Eufy hasn’t yet had a chance to earn a reputation for supporting its robots long-term because the company is relatively new to the category, and it could turn out to be great in that regard. To its credit, the company’s customer service is excellent, and it actually honors its one-year warranty. It recently started selling replacement batteries for its bots, alongside the replacement brushes and filters. But certain other parts you’d need to keep the 11S running for more than a couple of years aren’t currently sold—no spare dustbins or transmissions—and Eufy has not indicated that it plans to sell them. You can get new wheels, but you need to contact Eufy to find them, because they’re not listed on Amazon. And the track record for longevity so far is not the best: Several of our readers have told us that their Eufy RoboVac 11 robots completely broke within a year. That doesn’t make us very confident in the brand’s durability. If that’s a problem for you, look at a Roomba instead.

Buying Options

The Eufy RoboVac 30 is the same robot as our main pick, plus a couple of perks. It comes with boundary strips so that you can block off certain parts of your home if you want, and it has slightly stronger suction (200 Pa). Those perks are nice if you want to pay extra for them, though most people won’t need either. But we’re betting that on some days, the Eufy 30 will cost less than the 11S because of promotional pricing, so if you ever find that’s the case, you might as well get the 30. There is no downside—these bots have the same battery, same nav system, same brush roller, and so on.

We wrote about the uses for boundary strips earlier, so if you need to block off certain parts of your floors, the Eufy 30 will be a better bet than the 11S. The downside is that these are ugly magnetic strips that you have to lay across the floor. If boundaries are really important to you, maybe consider the Roomba 690, which uses a battery-powered virtual wall to create an invisible bot-barrier. Also, we checked, and the boundary strips that come with the Eufy 30 do not work with the 11S.

The magnetic boundary strips that guide the Eufy 30 are visible to people, too. If boundaries are important to you, consider the Roomba 690, which uses a battery-powered virtual wall. Video: Liam McCabe

As for the extra 200 Pa of suction: maybe it’s useful? We couldn’t spot an obvious difference between the Eufy 30 and 11S in our dust-pickup test, and the bin seemed to be about equally full in both bots when we ran whole-house cleanings. The added power must do something, but it does not obviously put the Eufy 30 in a superior category of cleaning.

Eufy also sells the RoboVac 30C, which is the same bot as the RoboVac 30, plus Wi-Fi connectivity so that you can control all of its functions with a smartphone app (and it has a better scheduling system), and turn it on or off using Alexa voice commands. Those features worked as expected in our testing, and it’s still just as short and quiet as the other RoboVac models. But the RoboVac 30C isn’t an obvious must-buy if you want a moderately priced robot with Wi-Fi, because the Roomba 690 costs about the same and has a few other advantages.

Buying Options

The iRobot Roomba 690 is not quite as nimble at navigating or effective at cleaning as the Eufy bots, but it’s still pretty good on both counts, and comes with some extra features that might make it a better choice for people who want an affordable robot.

To us, the most meaningful difference is that the Roomba 690 is meant to be repaired. When a major moving part wears out (the bot might call out an error code, or you might notice that something isn’t right and iRobot customer service can help you figure it out), you can usually just order a replacement directly from iRobot and handle the repair at home. The company still stocks parts for the original Roomba from 2002 and every model released since then—everything from brushes to batteries to wheels to dustbins. If it’s a more major repair, you may be able to ship it to iRobot for service.

Compared with the largely non-repairable Eufy bots, you might save some money with the Roomba over time. But even if you don’t save much, most people find that it feels good to repair the gadget that they’ve already got for as long as possible. And we’re confident that the Roomba 690 holds up well over time anyway, so you shouldn’t need to buy new parts very often. It’s essentially the same robot as the older Roomba 650, which we recommended in this guide from 2013 through early 2017, and I personally used the same Roomba 650 unit for four years and found that it held up great. Several other Wirecutter staff members have owned the same bot for years and have also found it to be reliable.

The most meaningful difference is that the Roomba 690 is meant to be repaired.

Another advantage is that you can connect the Roomba 690 to your home Wi-Fi network and then control it with an app (like when you’re out of the house) or with Alexa or Google voice commands. The app looks great and is easy to use, letting you start and stop the bot from wherever and easily set a cleaning schedule. It also tracks the age and number of cycles on the consumable parts (like the filters and brushes), and can remind you when it’s time to replace them. The voice commands are more of a gimmick or party trick—all you can do for now is tell the bot to start, stop, or look for its base—but some people find it cool or handy.

The bump-and-run-navigating Roomba 690 also comes with one virtual wall, which projects an invisible barrier that the bot won’t cross—handy if you want to block off part of your home, either to keep the bot’s cleaning area focused or to prevent it from going somewhere it always gets stuck. (You can buy extras if you want, though they are expensive.) It’s a much more elegant solution than the magnetic strips that the Eufy RoboVac 30 uses, and in our experience it’s usually simpler than messing around with the app-based “no-go lines” that some pricier mapping bots now offer. Another neat part of the virtual walls: They can create a circular barrier, useful if you want to keep the bot away from your pet’s water or food bowl.

But the Roomba 690 is not the robot that we’d recommend to most people because it doesn’t clean or navigate quite as well as the Eufy 11S. The battery doesn’t last as long (75 to 90 minutes per charge), so it may not cover as much ground in a session—that means, on average, more stuff gets left on the floor. It also tends to get stuck a little more, because the counter-rotating brush rolls tangle on cords more easily. The Roomba 690 is also nearly an inch taller than the Eufy 11S, so it’s less likely to fit under furniture. It’s louder, too, with more of a midrange whine than some competing models. (A few years ago, it was the quietest bot you could get, but times change). And it regularly bonks into obstacles harder than any other bot we’ve tested, basically crashing into anything in its path almost at the bot’s top speed (which is not that fast—around one foot per second, we’d estimate). It may even leave smudges on light-colored furniture, though this is uncommon. The Eufy 11S, by way of comparison, slows and usually stops just short of knocking into walls or chair legs.

Buying Options

If you have to clean a large space, or would prefer something that seems smarter or stronger than our other picks, we recommend one of the higher-end Roomba models.

The Roomba i7+ is the very best robot vacuum that money can buy. It’s built on a similar base as the Roomba 960 (so all of the cleaning and navigation performance we talk about below also apply to the i7+), but adds some extra convenience features: It can empty its own dustbin (the dock sucks debris through a trap door on the bot), and you can tell it to clean specific rooms (and skip others). We’ve found that, yeah, these features actually work as advertised, and legitimately make the i7+ even more convenient than other great robot vacuums. If you can stomach the price, we highly recommend it. This was such a fun robot to test and live with, with so many unique things to talk about, that we wrote an extensive, standalone review about it.

Buying Options

The iRobot Roomba 960 follows a predictable path, so given enough time, it can clean an entire level of a house without missing any patches. It’s one of the most powerful cleaners we’ve tested, and we’ve found over years of testing that it’s less likely to get stuck or confused than the mapping bots made by other brands.

The Roomba 960 navigates using a bump-and-track mapping system, which basically means it has a much smarter navigation system than the Roomba 690 or Eufy models we recommend (which are all bump-and-run). The Roomba 960 has a camera pointed toward the ceiling, plus an optical sensor pointed toward the ground (sort of like a computer mouse), which work in concert to map your floor plan while the bot cleans. The bot knows where it is and has already been, and it will explore your house until it finds all of the walls. That system lets it clean an entire level or your house in a logical, orderly fashion without missing spots. If the battery runs out before the cleaning is complete, the 960 can return to the dock on its own, recharge for a while, then pick up where it left off. So in a house with a sprawling floor plan, it’s much more effective than a bump-and-run bot, which relies on luck to cover all of the ground in a house.

Plenty of other robots can map your house as they work (like the Neato, Xiaomi, Electrolux, and certain EcoVacs models we’ve tested), and some of them cost less than the Roomba 960. But in our experience the 960 is the least likely to get stuck or confused, thanks to its tangle-resistant rollers, agile trap-escaping tricks, and mapping software that doesn’t outthink itself.

The Roomba 960 is also one of the strongest cleaners we’ve used, picking up more debris than other mapping bots in our crumb test and just about as much as the best bump-and-run robots (the key difference is that the 960 did it in a single pass, while the random robots needed three or more passes). It did very well in our dust-pickup test, too, leaving behind a thin, barely visible layer of flour. We found it to be excellent at collecting pet hair in our around-the-house testing. On a few occasions, we ran it immediately after the Roomba 690 completed a session, and the 960 would still come back with a bin totally stuffed with hair—it finds debris that cheaper bots will leave behind no matter how many passes they take. The counter-rotating extractor rolls (they aren’t really brushes) are great on carpets in particular and don’t get tangled with hair as easily as other brush rolls.

Like other Roomba models, we really like that the Roomba 960 is repairable. You should be able to keep this thing running for quite a while, which might help ease the sting of the purchase price.

The Roomba 960, disassembled for routine maintenance. Check out the tangle-resistant “extractors” in the front-center—they’re a lot different than typical brush rolls, and particularly good for getting pet hair out of rugs. Photo: Liam McCabe

The Roomba 960 is also one of the easiest mapping robots to use. The interface is superclean and really just focuses on starting and stopping the 960 vac’s automatic cleaning sessions. It doesn’t have any fancy interactive maps, manual steering, or very many adjustable settings. Other decent bots have those features if you want them. But we like that the Roomba 960 encourages you to let it do its own thing and automatically clean your whole house. Based on what we’ve learned about how people use their robots, we think most people will like that about it, too.

The Roomba 960 is also one of the strongest cleaners we’ve used, picking up more debris than other mapping bots in our crumb test.

You still get some control over the 960 where it makes sense. It uses the same virtual wall barrier maker, smartphone app, and voice-assistant compatibilities as the Roomba 690 (we cover the details above). Compared with the super-bare-bones Roomba 690 controls, the app lets you tinker with the settings on the Roomba 960 a bit more. You can choose to have the bot run one or two passes in a session, or to finish the session with a focused edge-cleaning run. If you want, it can show you a rough map of your floor plan after it’s done cleaning, and where it found the most debris. Then it completely “forgets” your floor plan before the next session starts, so you can move it up or down stairs with no fuss, move chairs around without confusing it—it’s the cleanest way to make the thing work well, we think.

The big downside is the price. The Roomba 960 is many hundreds of dollars more expensive than the Roomba 690 and Eufy models, and a little more than some other robots with floor-mapping capabilities. This is how much it costs to get an easy-to-use robot that can reliably clean a big space just about every time it runs. All of the other robots in that “in between” price range have some shortcoming that’ll annoy a big chunk of people, whereas we think the Roomba 960 should work well for almost anyone.

Another significant weakness, particular to the Roomba 960, is that it doesn’t really work in the dark (a problem that does not affect most robots). In low-light, the camera can’t see its surroundings, so it’s driving blind. It doesn’t need to be pitch-black, either: An unlit room near sunset can be dim enough to make the 960 just quit cleaning. If you run it in the morning while you’re at work, no problem. But you can’t reliably run it at night unless you leave some lights on.

Although battery life doesn’t matter so much for mapping bots because they can recharge and pick up where they left off, the Roomba 960 can run for 75 minutes per charge. Then it takes 90 minutes to recharge most of the way before it heads back out to keep cleaning. (A full recharge takes about three hours.)

You don’t need to connect the bot to Wi-Fi, but you will not be able to do anything besides manually start and stop the robot (and set up the virtual wall) without access to the app. iRobot caught some heat last year over a Reuters story suggesting that the company might sell owner data, but apparently the company’s chief executive was misquoted, and Reuters later corrected the story.

Like many bots, black carpets can pose a problem for the 960. But we tested it recently, and found that it did fine on a black, medium-pile, looped-fiber rug. Your experiences may vary.

The “full bin” indicator is prone to going off early when you’re cleaning a lot of pet hair—we recommend turning off the setting that sends the 960 back to its dock when the bin is full. This way, false positives won’t end the session early, and there’s no harm if it keeps going even when the bin is legitimately filled (the suction will drop off and the debris will stay on the ground anyway).

The competition

Plenty of other robots are very good, even great. Others, not so much. Here are the other noteworthy robot vacuums you can buy, in rough order of how much we like them.

If you want a mapping robot but don’t want to pay for the Roomba 960 or i7+, another cool and affordable choice is the Xiaomi Mi. It uses a laser rangefinder to map out your floors so that it can drive around most obstacles. Though it gets stuck on cords, carpet fringe, and high thresholds more often than the other bots we like, it’ll be fine in homes without those features. (It’s also better in dark rooms and on black floors than the Roomba 960.)

The battery life is excellent, even on the strongest suction setting. The cleaning performance is not as strong as that of the Roomba 960 (particularly for pet hair embedded in longer rugs), but it’s better than other single-pass mapping bots at this price. It also gives you much more control through the smartphone app than any other bot we’ve tested. It remembers your floor plan between sessions, and you can do all kinds of neat stuff with that function, like targeting certain areas where you want it to clean by tapping on your phone. (You’ll need to delete the map if you move the bot between floors of a house, though.) This bot has an ardent fan base, one that regularly asks us when we’re going to stop being stupid and start recommending the Mi.

The problem is, the Xiaomi Mi is not really meant to be sold in the US. The packaging and printed manual are in Chinese, the robot speaks Chinese by default, and you might have to pretend to live in China to unlock all of the best features in the app. (We couldn’t set up the app until we connected through a VPN—it turns out this is a common problem for US buyers.) Oh, and the manufacturer’s warranty is not valid in the US. If you’re comfortable with (or even excited about) those hurdles and the risk of losing hundreds of dollars if it breaks outside of the return window (several owner-reviewers wrote that this happened to them), knock yourself out! It’s a fun robot, especially if you want to experiment with all of the controls in the app. But it’s not a practical choice for most people. And it has become hard to find in stock on Amazon.

You could also consider the Roborock S5—essentially the second-generation version of the Xiaomi Mi, designed and built by the same company, Roborock. (Roborock is an independent company in which Xiaomi is an investor.), You can purchase it with an English-language manual and valid US warranty (though many of the listings on Amazon are still unofficial gray-market sellers, so be careful). We spent a few weeks testing it, and found that as advertised, it’s essentially a stronger version of the first-gen bot, plus an optional wet-wiping pad (which we didn’t find to be particularly useful—it doesn’t pick up much grime). Look, we still really like this robot, but it’s not much cheaper than the Roomba 960, and is still more prone to getting stuck and not as intuitive to use. However, the Roborock S5 could be worth considering if you’re really excited about having control, and don’t want to deal with the gray-market status of the original Xiaomi Mi model.

The Electrolux Pure i9 has the smartest-looking navigation system we’ve seen. As far as we know, it’s the only one in the US that creates 3D maps of your floors, which allows it to spot and avoid the kind of low-to-the-ground clutter that trips up or slows down other bots, like stray socks—or dog turds. It’ll drive right up the edge of most obstacles and clean around them without ever touching them. It’s also excellent at crossing high thresholds, and it works in dark rooms and on dark flooring. The cleaning performance is great, even on thicker carpets. So if your home is full of the kinds of things that tend to trip up most other robots, the Pure i9 might be your best option for smooth navigation.

I want to love the Pure i9, but it’s rough around the edges for something that’s so expensive (even after ubiquitous coupons that cut the price by hundreds of dollars, it’s still about the same price as the Roomba 960). Certain over-the-air software updates seemed to make the nav system dumber (spinning in place for five minutes, struggling to dock itself from one foot away, missing a whole section of my house) for a few days until a patch came out. It has no boundary markers (though it’s such a great navigator that it shouldn’t get stuck anywhere anyway), and the companion app is basic. There are barely any reviews for this thing, yet a couple of them call out Electrolux’s unhelpful customer service. We can’t recommend it right now.

The iRobot Roomba e5 is roughly as strong of a cleaner as the Roomba 960, but a semi-random navigator like the 690—and no surprise, the price sits in between the two. That puts it in a sort of no-man’s land that we don’t think makes sense for most people. But if your priority is picking up lots of pet hair from your thick carpets, and you don’t care so much about getting a mapping bot, you could consider the Roomba e5. It’s great in the same ways the other models are, too, with the app, virtual walls, and repairability. Plus, it has an updated dustbin design that you can rinse in the sink.

The Roomba 890 and Roomba 980 were both discontinued recently, replaced by the Roomba e5 and Roomba i7+ respectively. The older models were louder and you couldn’t rinse their bins in the sink; the Roomba 980 also does not have the i7’s smart mapping feature, or compatibility with the self-emptying dock. Otherwise, they are pretty similar to their replacements. If you’re comfortable with the specs, these are still excellent robots for the right price.

We’ve also seen limited-edition models like the Roomba 614 and Roomba 671. If you see anything on sale, check the specs to see how they compare with the other Roomba models we’ve discussed and decide accordingly. Basically, there’s no such thing as a bad Roomba; just don’t overpay for something that’s missing features or accessories.

If you want a really cheap bot with Wi-Fi that’s still good, keep an eye out for discounts on the EcoVacs Deebot N79S. This was our favorite robot from mid-2017 to mid-2018; it’s similar to the Eufy models we now prefer, plus it connects to a smartphone app and works with Alexa. But it’s louder and taller than the Eufy bots, and it turns out that matters more to most people than Wi-Fi. If you’re on the other side of that line, this Deebot is the most affordable Wi-Fi bot that works well—and is occasionally available for $50 cheaper than our favorites.

EcoVacs sells some mapping robots that are reasonably priced and excellent at navigation but not so much at cleaning. We tested the Deebot 900, and it picked up about 25 percent less debris than the Roomba 960—I could feel leftover cat litter sticking to my feet with every step I took across the test space. Essentially, it’s the Deebot N79S with a lidar turret. That might sound pretty good, but because the Deebot 900 makes only one pass by default, it doesn’t clean nearly as efficiently as the cheaper N79. And there’s something off-putting about this bot’s interface. The beeps it makes and the app are a little sterile, almost like you should be happy this thing is doing you the favor of cleaning your house. You should probably skip this bot. The Deebot 901 is the same bot with a different finish. The Ozmo 920 and 930 are also similar but add a mopping function, which we have not tested.

Neato robot vacuums get stuck in silly places much more often than their competitors. We’ve tested six of them over the past five years and they all have the same fundamental problems. Dining room chairs and carpet fringe are often too much for these bots to steer around—hardly any other bots struggle with these obstacles anymore. Thresholds give them more trouble than any other bots we’ve tested. We’d like to think the problem is that the 2D (lidar rangefinder) mapping system struggles with the nuances of real 3D homes, but other bots that rely on lidar (like the Roborock) are much nimbler than Neato bots are. In theory, software updates could fix the clunky navigation; we’ve seen improvements since we started testing Neato robots in 2013, but it’s not keeping up with the competition. A more fundamental, possibly intractable problem, is that wheel suspension is set up backward compared with other bots, and makes it harder for the Neato models to deal with uneven terrain.

Here, an older the Neato Botvac D80 got itself wedged between a toilet and a cabinet. It’s more prone than most other robot brands to get stuck in silly situations. Photo: Liam McCabe

All that said, we’ve heard from plenty of readers who are happy with their Neato robots. They tend to work pretty well in homes with uncluttered floor plans, and relatively few thresholds and area rugs. They have big, effective brushes and strong suction. And all of their current models now have some kind of smart mapping capability (though it’s a little janky). The base-model Botvac D4 Connected is probably the best deal of the current models. It’s relatively affordable for a mapping robot, and you can set up “no-go lines” around your home through the app—though the Roborock S5 costs a little less, and has somewhat similar smart-mapping features. The Botvac D6 Connected has more suction and a longer battery life than the D4, and you can set up smart maps for each floor of your house. It’s essentially the same robot as the flagship Botvac D7 Connected. But the D7 should be getting room-specific cleaning (sort of like the Roomba i7) through an over-the-air update sometime in 2018. The older, now-discontinued Botvac D3 Connected and Botvac D5 Connected might be the best Neato deals of all if you can find them on sale, because they are also slated to get an over-the-air update in 2018 to enable the same “no-go line” feature as the D4.

We’ve tested the iLife A4s and found that it was a little more likely to get stuck on thresholds and rug fringe than the cheap bots made by Eufy and EcoVacs. But loads of people own this robot and are very happy with it—if you can find it for really cheap, go for it. We also tested iLife’s attempt at a very-cheap mapping bot, the A8. It has a ceiling-facing camera like the Roomba 900 series (and other mapping bots) but costs about half as much. You get what you pay for, though. We found that it “drifted” significantly as it worked. If it started cleaning on a straight line, every height transition or little carpet slip set it on a slight diagonal so that after a few minutes, it might as well have been navigating randomly—it had totally lost its bearings. Like the EcoVacs Deebot 900, the suction is also way too weak to be effective in one pass, leaving behind debris that a “dumber” bump-and-run bot would probably grab on the second or third try.

Shark robot vacuums are nothing special—just overpriced bump-and-run robots. You might’ve seen the TV ads for the Shark Ion S87, which packages a handheld vacuum with the company’s latest Ion R85 robot. That’s also wildly overpriced; you could buy a Eufy 11S and our favorite handheld vacuum and save at least $150.

On that note, we tested the Coral One, another robot-handheld combo. This is a bad product at any price. This is the loudest robot we’ve ever tested, and by a wide margin—it’s instantly uncomfortable to be in the same room while this is running. We’re not entirely certain how the navigation works; it’s not a bump-and-run bot, but it doesn’t have any obvious cameras or lidar turrets, and either way the coverage is very inconsistent. I gave it 30 minutes to clean my dining room—much longer than any decent bot needs—and it still missed huge patches of the floor. It has no Wi-Fi or smart features, no barriers either. The robot-handheld hybrid design isn’t even clever or useful; the handle pulls double duty as the battery and control panel for both the bot and the handheld, but you still need to find somewhere to store the round, plastic nozzle for the handheld portion.

Samsung robots struggle with basic navigation and as a result have terrible owner reviews. We tested the Samsung Powerbot R7070, which can suck up more dust than most of the other bots we tested and has some features that seem cool, like a side brush that extends only when the bot detects a wall, and a self-cleaning main brush. But like the previous-generation Samsung bots we tested, it just can’t handle rug fringe or stray cords, and is more likely than others to randomly quit when it drives under furniture (even when it’s not stuck). The interface is cluttered and unintuitive, and even its beeps and bloops are more annoying than other bots’ sounds.

The LG Hom-Bot Turbo+ did great in our navigation tests. It never got stuck and handled every obstacle easily. It’s actually a bit nimbler than the Roomba 960. It’s quiet, too. However, we found it to be the weakest cleaner of all of the high-end bots. In our tests, it left behind more dust and hair than competing models. Its control scheme was also pretty confusing, with too many cleaning modes to pick from and unresponsive onboard buttons. The companion app was the least polished of the bunch. It’s also one of the most expensive bots available. We don’t think it’s one of the better choices.

The Dyson 360 Eye was a deeply flawed robot vacuum, finally discontinued after years of terrible ratings (an average of just 2.8 stars at Amazon) from owners who were frustrated by its ineffective navigation (check out this Today segment) and short battery life. It was a very strong cleaner, but we found no other qualities to justify its $1,000 price tag.

We also researched dozens of other robot vacuums from Bissell, Black+Decker, Deik, Hoover, Haier, Bobi, Infinuvo, Yujin iClebo, and more than a dozen other lesser-known brands that sell through Amazon. They tend to be cheaper bump-and-run models (though more cheap mapping bots are appearing) prone to getting stuck where better models do not. Some are from brands with very little presence in the US, so customer service can be difficult to find if you need it. At this time, we don’t recommend any models from these brands.

What to look forward to

We’ve spotted a few affordable bump-based robots that navigate in a semi-orderly, back-and-forth S-pattern rather than the typical semi-random zigzag pattern. (Thanks to reader JordanF for the tip.) The most notable of the bunch is the EcoVacs Deebot 601. We’re skeptical that the S-pattern is actually a better system—it seems like it could consistently miss certain parts of a home that a zigzagger would stumble across from time to time. We will have to test one out to see how it works, but we may not get around to that until 2019.

Miele just released the Scout RX2 in America. I don’t speak much German, but based on how the Scout RX2 seems to navigate in this video review, and the mediocre owner reviews over on Amazon Germany, it doesn’t seem like anything special—especially given the sky-high price.

Care and maintenance

Depending on your bot, you may need to do a little tidying up before you start a cleaning session. Here’s my experience: I prep my apartment by picking up any laundry and charging cables off the floor. I used to have to move my cat’s water bowl, but I’ve found that’s no longer necessary with our latest picks, because they either avoid collisions (EcoVacs and Eufy) or they come with a virtual wall that can set up a “do not cross” perimeter around it (Roomba). I also used to have to pick up lightweight area rugs so that they don’t get bunched up under the bot’s wheels; with the Roomba 690, I still do, but all of our other picks handle them fine.

Expect a few hiccups during the first few sessions. But after that, you’ll figure out your bot’s pain points and learn to make quick adjustments to your home to help it run more smoothly.

Hair will build up around the bearings of a bot’s brush roll and any other spinning parts. Make sure to clean it off at least every few weeks. Photo: Liam McCabe

All bots need a little maintenance. In most homes, we think a bot will stay in good shape with an hour of work per month, maybe a little more if the bot has a heavy workload.

Some tips:

Shake off the filters every few sessions.

You could save some money by using third-party filters, but doing so may void your warranty if you’re not careful.

Cut away any hair wrapped around the brush roll as necessary.

Clean off the bearings on the brush roll, caster, and side brushes every few weeks.

Wipe the sensors clean as needed, according to the manufacturer’s guidelines.

Keep a can of compressed air handy in case you need to blow dust out of gears or other hard-to-reach nooks in the bot.

You should replace filters and side brushes a few times per year, the brush roll about once a year, and the battery as needed—probably every second year, though that depends on how often you use the bot. And if your bot suffers a mechanical malfunction outside of the warranty period, you may be able to repair it, particularly if it’s a Roomba or Neato model. Don’t chalk up the bot as a total loss until you check to see if the broken part is available as a replacement.